Why did this site get banned ?

Site banned from google.

A site that seems to been booted out of the natural listings in google is,

www.OceanFinance.co.uk

they have had to create the new url to get reindexed

www.Ocean-Finance.co.uk

what reason do you think the original site got banned ?

Ocean Finance as in the guys who advertise in all the daytime TV programmes in the UK?

Are you doing their SEO or did you just notice they had been banned?

If you do their SEO what have you done recently that might be against Googles TOS? Give us a list of recent changes.

doing a

site:www.oceanfinance.co.uk

does give Google indexing a lot of pages, so they don't seem banned at the moment

I dont think that the older site is banned because gogole toolbar shows a PR of 5 plus many pages are also indexed the site: query shows 40 pages indexed and are included in google database.....why do u think that this site is banned ??

falling serps may be due to some other reason but not due to banning.

i have no reason to suspect that this is a ban...

some black hat technique is applied to the site.. means the site is cheating SEs to get on top on SERP...

Im not doing SEO for them. We have been watching the site for a while.

I won't name the company that is. But they got another customers site banned a few months back.

They have had a very aggressive link building campaign the last few months and had been top three for terms like 'personal loans', and 'secured loans', amongst an handful of others.

I'd agree that its doesnt look like a banned site, but the original site ranks outside the top 100 for the search term www.oceanfiance.co.uk so it looks like they have been hit with a massive penalty.

I didn't think it was possible to get such a penalty for aggressive link builidng, what else do people think the penalty could of been for ?

I would guess that. Does anyone know which one and why ?

It looks like they haven't been banned but that their backlinks have been discounted at a guess..

a lot of the UK companies that advertise on the cheap TV slots like Uswitch, moneysupermarket etc are all building links aggressively and if you look at them they are all low quality links in general, just masses and masses of them, moneysupermarket seem to be the worst that I have looked at, it wouldn't surprise me if they all get a lot of their links discounted before long

maybe its due to the most common type of penalty "BLOOP"
backlinks over optimization penalty.

They are listed by Yahoo as having 4.5 million links... hmm that seems suspiciously large for them all to be genuine..

here is an example of a page that links to them:

http://girldir.com/ a site that describes itself as "A fun look at fashion, beauty & style tips for every modern girl" at the very bottom of the page is a link anchored "remortgages" in quite small text in a light font colour on a light background. This is not a very relevant link and it is not exactly whitehat the way the text is done. If this isn't a paid link then what is?

If they have a lot more like this then i am guessing that all these bought links have been devalued, hence they drop in SERPS, it won't be a ban as the old adage goes "a link to your site can't help you" but by the same token some links give you no juice at all!

You are never as such penalised for gaining backlinks, I don't think google would ever ban or penalise the actual site that receives the link.

It does however penalise the actual link, so if it is suspicious over the link it will give the receiver no juice for it.

What happens is that the algo has changed and links it used to give juice for it is no longer giving juice, so the sites serps change.

Doing a search for a www.domain.com and not finding the domain.com in the 100 top listings doesn't really mean anything, does it? Unless the site is optimized for www.domain.com.

I think aggressive link building... too many too fast could cause penalties. I had a new small site that had no listing at all for four months but Google webtools gave link stats for it. One other large site of ours had sitewide links to it. Too many unnatural links too soon caused it to be banned before it listed. I changed all the sitewide links to nofollow and a few days later the new site was listed.

would this give a -100 position penalty on absoluteley everything ?

I don't think the site has been penalised, just the links in, I followed some more of the links into the site and there are loads from soft porn sites, not relevant at all to the finance industry..

Interestingly nortonfinance.co.uk have links on the same pages, so I would bet that they have taken a drop recently too (or are about to)

before the link building campaign they were ranking about 40 -50 for alot of terms, they were top for there brand terms.

They shot into top 10 for some very big terms, and then have shot out.

If the links were discounted they would of reverted to orginal positions, I have to believe Google has put an active penalty of somekind on them.

Rumours in the british industry are suggesting it is something to do redirects similar to what got the 17to40 car insurance domain crashing down the ranking last month.